Possible Corrupt File?

[Guitar_George]

Hi,

I was working on an .odt document the other day when my computer crashed. Since then whenever I open the document the ASCII Filter Options box pops up. I am not sure what to select in any of the drop down menus so I have just been clicking OK.

When the file is opened it is just ten pages of "#####". I have tried reading a few of the other posts on here with similar problems but I'm not too technically minded with this stuff so I'm not sure if my problem is any different. The file is however still 33.3k which I am pretty sure was the size before so I'm guessing there must be some data in there still...

Any help on this would be much appreciated, it took me forever to write this and I've got a really important exam coming up!

Thanks in advance.

[RoryOF]

Rename the file to type .zip, then open with an archive manager and extract Content.xml. If your plain text isn't there, forget it.

[Guitar_George]

Hey,
Thanks for such a quick response..
I did as you suggested and tried opening the file in the default windows archive manager, winrar and winzip. None of them would open it, they all said it was corrupted. Can you suggest a different archive manager or does this mean its game over?

[RoryOF]

If they don't open it, forget that approach. Your only hope is that there is a .bak or a tmp file in your user profile. If so, move that out to some other direectory and rename to type .odt and see if it will open with OpenOffice. If not, get re-writing. The thing about re-writing is that sometimes the document in in your head and it is mostly a case of simply retyping.

[Guitar_George]

I tried looking in my temporary folder but I couldn't really make much sense of any of the random gibberish names of the folders.. Can you suggest anything to look out for?

[RoryOF]

Do a global search for file of type *.bak and then of type *.tmp made in the last day or two days; you are looking for something about 33k or under and probably under an OpenOffice directory.

[Guitar_George]

I'll give that a crack.. Thanks a lot for your help. Greatly appreciated.

[Hagar Delest]

Hashes? Then the file is lost: see that thread: 22 pages term paper replaced with pound signs.

What OS BTW? You should add it in your forum signature.

[Guitar_George]

Hey,
Thanks for the link. I'm using Windows Vista.